Inspired Life: Coffee, Sharp Objects, small town living, and Cross Examined Life

Inspiration: Coffee

Come on… who isn't inspired by the bean? 

Inspired Life: UW Dance, PodCon, Dry January, small business

Inspiration: Creative people

UW Dance... specifically the faculty show we attended last night. Jaw dropping, relevant, beautiful, astonishing, and evocative. I took away themes of community, mental illness, feminism, divergence, change, and respect.

Is it an ending or a beginning?

I love stories where the ending is the beginning, or the beginning starts first with the ending. Or, the beginning is the core of the story, the tight center, and the narrative flows out and away from it, a widening aperture. 

I rarely see the end of a year as an ending. Or as a beginning. In fact, I never feel this kind of transition in January (I feel it more in September, probably because I've inculcated the academic calendar to my rhythms and can't help but think of the end of summer as the "end" of the year). 

This all reminds me of a psychic I once saw. I asked her why I was so attracted to the spiral symbol. She told me to stop thinking about it as a two-dimensional thing, that I should stretch it out like a spiral staircase that never ends. 

For me, that was a watershed moment. I began to recognize personal, creative energy as a kind of ebb and flow, or contraction/expansion, instead of a path walked around a circular labyrinth. 

2018 has been equal parts contraction and expansion. I: